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I'm under the impression that a user may post a question with as many questions inside the main post as they wish, providing they're relevant to the main question. However, I've come across recent comments stating that posting more than four questions within a post is against the rules here. So just one question for now:

How many questions may a user ask within one post?

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  • $\begingroup$ There is no harm in partitioning a question in closely related subquestions to the same topic, this can even make a question better structured and more readable. $\endgroup$
    – Dilaton
    Jul 18, 2013 at 16:23
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    $\begingroup$ It is quite misleading to not mention the post in question, which I know, is this: physics.stackexchange.com/questions/71481/…. The 5 questions are quite sufficiently unrelated. The first question could have been in one post, and the remaining in others. Because the first was a sufficiently unrelated topic. It was about the invariance of Higgs field under $ U(1) \otimes SU(2) $ transformations, whereas the rest of them could make one queastion. Just because they're about the Higgs field, isn't enough. t. $\endgroup$
    – Abhimanyu Pallavi Sudhir
    Jul 18, 2013 at 17:43
  • $\begingroup$ Obvious duplicate: meta.physics.stackexchange.com/q/13 $\endgroup$
    – Abhimanyu Pallavi Sudhir
    Jul 26, 2013 at 15:44

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How many questions may a user ask within one post?

Just one.

Now, there is some flexibility in how you define a "question." I'm not saying that you can only have one question mark in a post, or anything like that. It's fine to ask about different aspects of what is essentially the same underlying problem. But everything in your post should be about one conceptual issue.

A good guideline is that you should be able to pose one question as the post title, and everything in the body should relate to that one question.

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There is no hard limit. The only policy is that sufficiently unrelated questions should be asked in separate posts.

What does "sufficiently unrelated" mean here? Basically, questions should only be grouped together if you can reasonably imagine someone else who has one of those questions in mind would likely be simultaneously wondering about the others.

If someone asks a question about neutrino absorption cross sections in lead, it is reasonable that they ask about the cross sections for each of the three generations of neutrinos. However, if some student just lists five thoughts that occurred to them while taking intro EM this past semester, that would probably warrant splitting into separate posts.

I find that a good discriminant is whether or not the questions are (or could easily have been) formatted into a bullet-point list. A list of questions is unlikely to have a strong conceptual underpinning uniting them, and is probably a sign that the questions are not sufficiently alike to be kept together.

On the other hand, multiple questions that flow with the problem statement are often good - they tend to ask about the same underlying physics from different angles. For instance, one of my questions has 5 question marks spread throughout the body, but they are all driving at the same underlying issue. Answering just one would be insufficient for settling the matter, and it would be difficult to answer one without simultaneously answering the others.

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  • $\begingroup$ Apologies for the self-promotion - I simply remember my own questions best. $\endgroup$
    – user10851
    Jul 18, 2013 at 16:48

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